Broken promises

Before the handover, Bremer [head of the US Coalition Provisional Authority] said a long goodbye. In his farewell meetings, he insisted that the CPA had set Iraq on the path to a democratic government, a free-market economy, and a modern infrastructure.

But where the CPA saw progress, Iraqis saw broken promises. As Bremer prepared to depart, electricity generation remained stuck at around 4,000 megawatts - resulting in less than nine hours of power a day to most Baghdad homes - instead of the 6,000 megawatts he had pledged to provide. The new army had fewer than 4,000 trained soldiers, a third of what he had promised. Only 15,000 Iraqis had been hired to work on reconstruction projects funded with the Supplemental, rather than the 250,000 that had been touted. Seventy per cent of police officers on the street had not received any CPA-funded training. Attacks on American forces and foreign civilians averaged more than 40 a day, a threefold increase since January.

Assassinations of political leaders and sabotage of the country's oil and electricity infrastructure occurred almost daily. In a CPA-sponsored poll of Iraqis taken a few weeks before the handover of sovereignty, 85% of respondents said they lacked confidence in Bremer's occupation administration.

Because of bureaucratic delays, only two per cent of the $18.4 billion Supplemental had been spent. Nothing had been expended on construction, health care, sanitation, or the provision of clean water, and more money had been devoted to administration than all projects related to education, human rights, democracy, and governance combined. At the same time, the CPA had managed to dole out almost all of a $20 billion development fund fed by Iraq's oil sales, more than $1.6 billion of which had been used to pay Halliburton, primarily for trucking fuel into Iraq.

· From Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran